Remember and forget in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons: A corpus-informed account

Abstract

This article presents findings of corpus-informed stylistic analysis of the verbs remember and forget in Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons, published in 2000. The study aimed at testing two hypotheses generated through qualitative analysis: (1) that Angels and Demons employs the verbs remember and forget with a higher-than-usual frequency; and (2) that these verbs are employed by Brown as a means to present new information via focalized narration. Using WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2013) and data drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008), I demonstrate that the first of these hypotheses is validated in the case of forget, and specifically the word-form forgotten, which is overrepresented in the novel at a level that is statistically significant. This trend is reversed for remember, which is significantly underrepresented. With regard to the second hypothesis, I will show that while forget is often used in the presentation of new information, this is not true for remember, which is more likely to be used to indicate an information gap resulting from misremembering or failure to remember. I will suggest reasons for these patterns, arguing that the marked frequency with which Brown employs these two verbs can be attributed to a tension between his competing communicative and rhetorical aims, namely, his need to present the reader with new information on the one hand, and his attempt to enact an ethical appeal for his protagonist Robert Langdon on the other.